The 14th Best Movie I Saw This Year: Thor

You may be familiar with the director of this film from some of his other work.

In the past thirty years, no individual has been more mentally connected with the work of Shakespeare by the general public than Kenneth Branagh. He has directed and starred in an exceedingly large number of award-winning film adaptations of the Bard’s works – most notably Henry V (for which he was nominated for an Oscar in both acting and directing) but also As You Like It, Much Ado About Nothing, Love’s Labour Lost, and Hamlet. The man has been feted with nominations for Golden Globes and Golden Lions and Golden Bears since the late 80’s. And since Thor is a grandiose story of an action hero torn from Norse legend, with themes of love and honor, and fathers and sons, and betrayal, Branagh seemed a perfect fit to bring this story to the silver screen.

So, if you’ll give me a few minutes for a brief aside to the director here: Kenneth, why is this movie so damn silly?

I know, I know: it’s tough to make a comic book movie feel grounded. From the very beginning, Thor (an impressively buff Chris Hemsworth) goes to war with the Frost Giants of Jotunheim to seize the source of their power, the Casket of Ancient Winters. I guess at that point, you just wrote off realism for the rest of the movie. You have Odin (played by Anthony Hopkins with all the gravitas one can muster while looking like this, fall into “Odinsleep” at one point, the laziest plot device I have ever heard of. The characters cross a rainbow bridge guarded by an all-seeing guardian (Idris Elba, who is, racially speaking, a bit unconvincing as a Norseman) to travel by the Bifröst in between worlds. So maybe you thought looking for rationality here was a bit of a lost cause.

But there are so many way to keep a movie like this from sliding into camp, Kenneth, and your movie uses none of them. You’re man who adapts Shakespeare, and you were flummoxed by the work of Stan Lee.

After all, this is a movie that Natalie Portman signed on to just because you was involved. “I was just like, ‘Kenneth Branagh doing Thor is super-weird, I’ve gotta do it,’” she said later. That’s an Oscar-winning actress telling you she assumed you’d find a way to make this film serious, Kenneth, and instead you spend a good chunk of the movie dealing with the arguments of Thor’s exceedingly pointless Asgard entourage(They’re known as Sif and the Warriors Three, which sounds like a band that puts 80’s metal licks behind J.R.R. Tolkien lyrics. Whenever I talk to anyone who saw Thor, the first thing I say is “seriously, why are we supposed to care about Thor’s friends?” The only response I ever get is “I know! What was that?”).

You took a comic book about a guy with a flying hammer and somehow made it more silly. How is that even possible? 

And yet… despite (and sometimes because of) all the nonsense, this movie proved to be a lot of fun. Summer movies are designed for cheeseball adventures, and I don’t mind armored men with odd accents hurling giant hammers at each other and setting Natalie Portman’s heart aflutter. That’s the exact sort of thing I go to the movies for in late May, when summer movies kick off. These movies are supposed to be bombast and nonsense and bright colors, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. Could I have done without the robot from the original The Day The Earth Stood Still pointlessly destroying a small New Mexico town? I could have. But intergalactic space battles between immortals? I’m on board.

A lot of the credit should go to the cast, who are all much more convincing in their roles than they have any right to be. It is not easy to play a Norse god, but Hemsworth, Perkins, and Tom Hiddleston sell the grandiosity of it with seemingly little effort. And Natalie Portman plays an astrophysicist wholeheartedly dedicated to her work. I don’t know how Portman manages to remain a movie star while so effortlessly playing these socially-awkward types, but it may be time for us to realize that she’s closer to this in real life than she is to this.

Since Branagh won’t be at the helm next time, let me say this to whoever ends up being in charge of this thing: I know I don’t make this request too often, but I could use a little more sturm und drang next time around, guys. Even in the summer. Even in late May.

Dear Oprah… I Think I Know What Happened (Guest Post!)

It's a privilege to announce this blog's first ever guest post, from a buddy of mine who wanted to express his thoughts on the Oprah situation. I'm a huge fan of guest posts, so if you've ever got something to say that you'd like to express on this blog's incredibly massive platform, feel free to let me know.

I'll pop in and out on this post, you'll know it's me when it's in italics. And also because I'll probably be being mean.

(Thanks to Ben for letting me post. As I am currently employed in the broadcast television industry, I requested to be kept anonymous (A wise choice. Oprah's gaze is far-reaching. I sort of picture it like Sauron's eye, myself). Suffice it to say that I went to college with Ben, and he and I see eye-to-eye on quite a bit.)

If you didn't hear about Oprah Winfrey's public relations code-red earlier this week, you can read about it here. 

Oprah's first mistake, as pointed out by the article (don't worry, I didn't read the article either), is asking people with Nielsen boxes to watch her cable network, OWN. You can't do that in the TV business. It is a cardinal rule. Nielsen, as a company, actually goes out of its way sometimes to remind those in television to keep the data pool "clean." Those boxes that sit in people's homes may look innocuous, but they send back numbers to Nielsen every day: numbers that translate into ratings. Ratings translate into jobs gained or lost in an already volatile industry.

The former maven of daytime has since apologized, and Nielsen is examining whether or not to assign a dreaded "asterisk" to some of OWN's ratings, meaning that the data has been contaminated and is therefore unreliable for use by potential advertisers. (soon, her data will be quarantined, then buried deep inside the earth's core.)

But a deeper question remains: why hasn't Oprah's impressive past success helped her thus far create a cable TV juggernaut? (or an actual Juggernaut? She has the money for it.)

One answer is quite simple. The channel, network, whatever you want to call it, should not be called "OWN." It should simply be called "Oprah," or "The Oprah Network." The American viewing public has a remarkably short memory. (But somehow remembers the lyrics to every novelty rap song from the 90's.) While the hype surrounding the network's launch was neck-deep, once things kicked off, the channel began its descent into relative oblivion. I daresay many people scroll past OWN on their cable channel guide because they don't even remember what it is. (They're missing out. Unfaithful: Story of Betrayal* is top-notch.)

Even before this incident, it was apparent Oprah was on a mission for more viewers. A blitz of commercials blazed across the cable universe, showing her interviewing the likes of George Lucas and Steven Tyler at their respective homes. After all, if she could put herself in the promos, wouldn't that finally get people to watch? (Maybe, but... it would still be an interview with George Lucas or Steven Tyler, though.)

"Oprah," the long-running broadcast show, was successful, even until the end, because it became more than just a talk show with the occasional celebrity interview. It became a spectacle. And spectacle, more than anything, is what is needed to make ratings gold on both broadcast and cable TV, these days. (And you know who sold spectacle better than anyone? Carnival barkers! Let's bring back carnival barkers!)

When you tuned in, you never knew if it was going to be a regular, run-of-the-mill show, or if she was going to give a car to every single person in the studio audience. No one else did that. No one else does that. (Though I've been switching dentists every six months, just in case)

We don't have time for appointment television anymore. We're all staring at our phones all day. And that simple fact is scaring television's powers-that-be to death. (Not a metaphor. The mortality rate is quite shocking.)

So, what does Oprah's decide to do? She decides to use one of the newer (more powerful?) media to try to push people to an older one. She hops on Twitter and haphazardly decides to beg people (during the Whitney-Houston-spectacle-driven Grammy's Sunday night) to switch over to her network.

Though I have heard a few statistics to the contrary, I firmly do not believe that using Facebook and Twitter to push people to appointment TV viewing works, especially among viewers under 35. With the exponential increase of the use of Netflix and various DVR services, we have been trained to watch only what we want to watch, only when we want to watch it. Unless, as I said, it's a spectacle. Like the finale of "LOST." (No spoilers! I have it DVRed!)

As cable TV audiences continue to fragment and shrink, people like Oprah need to find and  develop better ways to push people from television to their online, on-demand presence. Not the other way around. (possible solution: Juggernauts. They're very convincing)

*One of my college roommates was just on this terrible show. If you click the link, he's the Hispanic guy re-enacting the white guy's life.

By the way, this may seem obvious, when you're searching for images of Deep Throat from All The President's Men, don't absent-mindedly Google Image Search "deep throat." You're welcome.

The 15th Best Movie I Saw This Year: Drive

I believe that I’m either supposed to have hated Drive, or thought it was the best movie of the year. It turns out I did neither.

It’s a flawed movie I liked very much, and would recommend to anyone who thinks that long, slow scenes of Ryan Gosling driving around while 80’s pop songs play is their idea of a good time. So, all of the internet, then.

Two things that are true about this movie:
1. Ryan Gosling is very good in this movie.
2. Ryan Gosling is possibly miscast in this movie.

As the unnamed main character, Gosling is supposed to be strong (sure), conflicted (definitely), and silent (not a normal fit, but it works fine). You can tell he feels things, but his personality is buried deep down, out of reach to those he comes in contact with. That is, until he comes in contact with Carey Mulligan and her son. Mulligan is playing (shockingly!) a sweet, innocent woman with a predilection for helping bruised, complicated men. To protect her, Gosling becomes violent (better than you’d expect), ruthless (less good), and cruel (unconvincing), fighting his way through a series of thugs until he finally faces the sadistic boss (Albert Brooks) who caused all of this. Brooks, by the way, has no problem selling to me that he’s sadistic.

But then, is that the point? Are we supposed to believe that Gosling is still the same gentle heart he always plays, his wry grin hidden by layers of pain and emptiness? Maybe. It’s an interesting puzzle to sort out, and Gosling has more than enough going on in his face to let the viewer try to work it out on their own – and there’s more than enough time for them to do so, since much of the movie is sustained shots of Gosling driving endlessly around the streets of Los Angeles, staring blankly ahead.

I understand why so many people hated it. The TV spots for this movie were tailored so that most people who saw them would assume that this movie was some sort of Gosling-centric Fast and Furious movie. Most of the spots looked like this:

Whereas this is a clip of the opening credits of the movie, which feels a little different:

The ad campaign was so misleading one disappointed moviegoer actually sued the studio about it. My favorite part of the suit? Where she complained that there was “very little driving in the movie.” I can only hope that someone once sued Paramount over how little snow there was in White Christmas. The lawsuit must have been at least partially successful, since this a more indicative trailer, and it literally asks the question “what do people see in this movie?” right at the beginning. That’s a lot of self-doubt for a TV spot. Did this commercial play on television? It seems unbelievable:

Me, I liked the slow pace of the film, checkered with occasional moments of startling violence of the Tarantinan variety (at one point, Gosling spends a good two minutes stomping off a guy’s jaw). But I saw the film in a theater with three other people, and one of them was so frustrated by the movie that he ended up answering two separate cell phone calls during the film. Even a movie with as limited draw as Drive still managed to divide its audience. Even for an indie movie, that’s pretty divisive.

Those Left Behind IV: The Ignored Actors and Actresses (pt. 2)

Mark Harris already said everything I could've said about the insanity happening in the Best Animation category (though he has the gall to refer to Wallace and Gromit as an inferior award winner, a position I cannot support), and a simple Google search will lead you to hundreds of articles deriding the Academy's bizarre decision to ignore yet another Steve James documentary, as well as Senna, Cave of Forgotten Dreams, Buck, Into The Abyss, Being Elmo, Page One: Inside The New York Times, Project Nim, and Joan Rivers: Piece of Work - or, every documentary that garnered any praise or attention this year. I'm beginning to feel like the voters for this category are some breed of hipster documentary snobs: they only like movie's that aren't too mainstream (because Werner Herzog's 3-D study of caves was totally inescapable this year). 

Every other category evokes little to no anger - somewhere out there, someone's horrified by Super 8's snub in sound editing, but that person is not me. So I'm gonna finish my review of the Oscar nominations with one last look at the acting categories.

Best Supporting Actor and Actress
I've already talked about Best Supporting Actress once, and I simply can’t summon any anger for the rejected potential nominees. Frankly, I can’t even really think of any. I should have done this piece sooner. Sandra Bullock, I guess? Oh, Shailene Woodley.

Woodley’s an intriguing subject. She’s so very good in The Descendants, yet until now she’s been best known for the ABC Family show she’s on, “The Secret Life of the American Teenager,” a show she’s supposedly not very good on.

What, you expected me to watch the show in order to write this review? That’s ridiculous. I don’t get paid for this. Who would put themselves through such an affair for no reason?

Oh, that’s right, me. Challenge accepted!

…alright, hunting for it on OnDemand… pulling it up… and… here we go.

(fourteen minutes later) …and I’m back. That’s all I can take, guys. This show is awful. 

It’s everything I don’t like about scripted television – bad, flat lighting, hastily delivered lines, several unconnected storylines running along from episode to episode without resolution, all the action happening in a series of close-ups to hide the shoddiness of the sets (unsuccessfully). There are ways to sell a show on a tiny budget so it doesn’t look cheap. This show doesn’t do any of them.

All the acting is bad, but there’s varying levels of badness to it – there are bad actors who can’t do any better, and there’s good actors who aren’t being the opportunity to do better work. And of those, Woodley looks like the best of the lot. I mean, Molly Ringwald’s in this show too, and while it’s been a long time since Sixteen Candles, she’s doing pretty lousy work here.

Woodley’s taken some offhand shots at the show during her interviews for The Descendants, mostly in a “no offense, but working on ABC Family is not like working with Alexander Payne and George Clooney” sort of way. The show’s creator, Brenda Hampton, pretended not to notice and insisted that “doing that film was a very good thing for her and for us. She brought what she learned back.” Early prediction: Woodley lands a bigger role in a big film sooner rather than later, her star starts to rise, and she departs the show in a year or two. No one stays on ABC Family if they can’t help it, with the possible exception of Melissa Joan Hart.

For Best Supporting Actor, the obvious complaint would be Albert Brooks for Drive, since he’d managed to win about 40% of the supporting actor trophies that were handed out before getting ignored by the Academy. There’s no way he would have beaten Christopher Plummer next Sunday (a respected elderly actor playing a dying gay father? Who could top that?), and Brooks seems to be taking it pretty well, so it’s just one less tuxedo rental for him, I guess.

As to those people who kept harping on Andy Serkis’ being ignored for playing the digital version of Caesar, the ape in Rise of the Planet of the Apes? Let it go. Sure, playing a role like that looks awfully tough, but when has the Academy ever nominated an acting performance from a prequel to a reboot? Annoyed the Academy doesn’t respect motion capture? Of course they don’t! Who wants to give an Oscar to a guy for playing a chimp?

Mostly, these snubs are just indicative of the Academy’s stances on the movies these actors came from. Woodley not being nominated means The Descendants has no chance of winning Best Picture, if it ever did. Brooks being ignored was just one of the various ways the Academy ignored Drive (no nominations in Best Actor, Picture, or Director, either). And Serkis being ignored just means that the Academy still hates monkeys.

When you get down to it, there’s really not a whole lot that’s shocking here.

The 16th Best Movie I Saw This Year: The Lion King (In 3-D)

Whenever movie sites discuss the re-release of a movie to theaters, there’s always an audible sniff and a scathing put-down that this new release is “nothing more than a cash grab.”

Well, of course it’s a cash grab. They’re a movie studio. What else would it be? And furthermore, who cares?

Most movies walk a fine line with insolvency. They gamble on a lot of movies, most of them don’t hit, and then they’re saved by the occasional film that sells like gangbusters and makes them hordes of money. A studio like Summit Entertainment acquires the ‘Twilight’ books, makes a two and a half billion dollars off of them, and gets purchased by Lionsgate this month. A studio like MGM has a century of success, then makes a couple bad calls in a row, finds itself two and a half billion in debt, and is forced to file for bankruptcy. It’s a high-stakes game they’re playing out there.

The 3-D craze has played itself out, but there’s a new concept emerging where studios take movies that have already made hoards of money, convert them to 3-D, and release them to the public again. The Lion King was the first of the bunch, but this spring we’ve already had Beauty and the Beast, Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, and soon Titanic will be back in theaters. I’m assuming the pattern will continue until we get to Norbit or something.

A lot of people hate 3-D, and are diametrically opposed to this practice. I have no problem with it, for two reasons:

1. Movie studios need to make a lot of money, and this isn’t a bad way to do it. Another way they do it is by grabbing old things that I loved, like ‘Battleship’, or Alvin and The Chipmunks, and turning them into horrifying film franchises. Then those franchises advertise their terrible films with their terrible puns and terrible catchphrases and terrible poop jokes (I’m talking about the Chipmunks movies here. Battleship doesn’t have any poop jokes. I don’t think) everywhere I go, until I’m tempted to tear out my eardrums and retinas.
   
   This way is easier. They convert the film, re-release it to theaters, there’s a small, noninvasive promotional push for it showing scenes from a movie I liked, and then it’s gone again. I didn’t see Beauty and the Beast in theaters, but I’ve always liked the movie and didn’t mind watching clips of Gaston and Cogsworth pop up on my television every now and then.
2. These movies are a way to connect to my childhood. I was ten when my grandparents took me to see The Lion King. I loved it then, and seeing it again on a big screen, munching popcorn in the dark, reminded me of what I loved about it. It’s a great movie, epic and grand, and the animation is beautiful.* I imagine that if I had kids, I’d enjoy the ability to take my child out to a film of that quality and have us experience it together. When you consider how low the standards are of parents taking their children to the theater, that’s a real win.

So calm down, everyone. It’s not a desecration of your childhood to have people watch a movie you liked while wearing 3-D glasses. And anyone who thinks it is should be forced to watch both Battleship and Alvin and the Chipmunks 3: Chipwrecked, just to teach them a lesson.

*If you’re wondering why I chose to rank The Lion King, a movie I love, 16^th overall in a weak year for film: While The Lion King is a tremendous film, I enjoyed the experience of re-watching­ the film about the same as I enjoyed watching the films that surrounded it for the first time. But then, I’m not a movie re-watcher in general.